Posts Tagged ‘mo’

The new BlackBerry 7 OS brings the “liquid graphics” ability, which we’re sure to hear more about at the BlackBerry World trade show later today. According to RIM’s press release, it offers “60 frames per second performance with instant UI action/response,” which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We’ll have to see how it performs in demos today.

Rather than being an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 7 is an upgrade to the existing BlackBerry 6 OS. It’s “designed to power the new BlackBerry Bold platform”—implying it may not work on earlier phones—and it adds better graphics capabilities, a faster browser, and BlackBerry Balance, which lets users segregate personal from business content on their smartphones.

Novell does Mono for Android

Novell has unveiled Mono for Android, a toolset that will let developers create .NET and C# applications for Google’s Linux-based mobile operating system using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Announced on Wednesday, Mono for Android widens the scope for mobile developers who use Microsoft’s .NET framework — Novell released a similar product, MonoTouch, for Apple iOS devices in 2009. Mono is the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s toolset, designed to make it possible to run .NET applications across multiple platforms.

“Since the introduction of MonoTouch in 2009, developers have experienced how Mono streamlines mobile application development,” Novell developer platforms chief and Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza said in a statement.

“As a result, many asked us to build a similar tool for Android. We developed Mono for Android to give both individual developers and businesses a way of sharing their code across multiple mobile platforms, increasing efficiency and reuse of their C# and .NET expertise across the board.”

Mono for Android includes the core Mono runtime, bindings for native Android APIs, a Visual Studio 2010 plug-in for developing and testing Android applications, and a software development kit (SDK). The enterprise edition costs $999 (£613) per developer per year, including maintenance and updates. A five-developer enterprise licence costs $3,999 per year, and a professional edition costs £399 per developer per year. Those developers with existing MonoTouch licences can get a 50 percent discount on Mono for Android “for a limited time”, Novell said.

Fortune recently did a post, on a survey, which indicated that Android developers now consider it to be a total mess. The survey was conducted by Baird’s William Powers, and involved some 250 developers who highlighted the following problems:

Device fragmentation. 56% of Android developers said that operating system fragmentation among the various Android devices was a meaningful or “huge” problem, a percentage that actually increased over the past three months.

Ease of development. iOS outscored Android, but both were considered far easier to develop for than, say, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry OS or Nokia (NOK) Symbian.

App visibility. “iOS continues to lead,” Baird reports, “followed by Blackberry, with Android still receiving poor marks in this category.” Developers are particularly concerned about the level of “junk” apps in the Android ecosystem.

There aren’t many aspects of C++ that C# doesn’t do at least as well at if not better. The C++ const keyword is on such. It not only declares constants but also allows contracts to enforce object immutability.

A year ago, Microsoft officials went public with their roadmap for the company’s various embedded mobile operating systems. At that time, the Redmondians said to expect Windows Embedded Handheld 7 — an enterprise-targeted update to its ruggedized-device operating system — to arrive in the second half of calendar 2011. But those plans seemingly have changed.